GPS (global positioning system) and other location data, such as obtained from cellular phone towers, are not in a form that is easy for humans to understand. People typically do not think in terms of numerical coordinates, latitude/longitude or even street addresses, but rather tend to better understand friendly names for locations.
Semantic place labeling refers to the process of giving a meaningful name to a location. Examples of semantic place labels are labels like “home,” “work,” “gym” and “school” and other geographic locations where a person spends time. Such labels not only provide understandable location information to people, but often allow for automatically inferring activities. For instance, sleep or family dinners usually occur at home rather than at work or school, (although there are exceptions).
Existing technologies compute semantic labels with heuristics, which are difficult to program reliably. For example, a “home” may be identified as where a person spends the most time during the hours of 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., but this does not apply to many people, such as those who work nights. It is cumbersome and highly error-prone to write heuristics that sufficiently cover the large number of possible cases and places. Classification based upon similar rules, along with manual labeling by other users, has the same drawbacks.